


Damage With Care

by exAm



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Dark, M/M, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 07:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12526052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exAm/pseuds/exAm
Summary: Light and Misa are sentenced for their time as Kira and get sent to maximum security prison. The prison is expected to meet a set of strange demands from the detective who apprehended them.L moves on with his life until the news Misa Amane has died in prison brings him by to investigate her death personally.LawLight. Psychological horror and suspense. Violence and very angry smart people arguing with each other.





	Damage With Care

"In the first days

Of the springtime 

Made you a prince with a thousand enemies 

Made a trail of

A thousand tears 

Made you a prisoner inside your own secrecy.

-Ghosts, Lady Tron  
  
  
“How glorious it is - and also how painful to be an exception.” - Musset

**Damage With Care**

 

  
  
The Kira case had been resolved in three short steps.

Sometime after freeing the original Kira suspect and following the too good to be true lead on another Kira-like perpetrator within a corporation; L had lost the drive to pretend that Light Yagami, who kept proving all his theories about the personality type of the first Kira while chained to him, was in some way not Kira.  
  
Though he let his group help with the preparations; L took all the final steps to resolve the Yotsuba Group Case on his own.  
  
Once he’d gotten ahold of the murder weapon, a black notebook that magically caused the heart attacks Kira had staked his name on, he had all the evidence he needed.  
  
Yet things were not so simple. He met the pale shinigami who haunted the notebook and she gave him an ultimatum that changed his course. L could not allow any judgment be passed against Misa Amane and Light Yagami that would end in the death penalty. Because if he did - this Shinigami who called herself, Rem, would kill him. She didn’t give him her reasons why she guarded the two young people but they were easy to guess as she bad-mouthed Light and lauded Misa, sometimes in the same breath.

So he had been forced to do what he could to make the two look innocent enough of their heinous crimes. Not completely innocent, though. He chose to record the presence of the demon to prove a very complicated coercion argument. He passed the notebook around at multiple government headquarters. Showing her over and over again to shocked assemblies. She was shot at at nearly every meeting. To which L would call out from monitors and tv screens behind his white 'L' text with some glee, "Rude!"

It had been no easy task to convince the governments of the world that Light and Misa had been possessed by this same demon.  
  
It had all been far too tedious for L’s taste. Red tape met with him everywhere. His insistence the two young people had been possessed by the demon he kept showing everyone hardly sufficed; as shocking as the evidence was. For her part, Rem backed him saying in a not-very-evil sounding voice that she had caused the deaths of criminals because she was sick of humanity's comfort with murder. "Early death." Rem said once to every separate group, with heavier conviction than her 'murderers bad' spiel, "Is for my kind to decide. Not yours."  
  
‘Quiz them extensively.’ L had promised the Japanese NPA after they were left with the two Kira convicts on their hands. ‘Though I can prove it was the two of them working in tandem; you will find as I have, they retain no memories.’ 

L had been tempted more than a few times in the process to give up, move on, let the young man and woman receive the death penalty. But Rem stood behind him steely eyed with her resolve. He did not want to die. He’d worked very hard to become the three greatest detectives in the world.  
  
In the end the Japanese government acknowledged that because of the supernatural influence it was entirely possible that Light Yagami and Misa Amane were in a very construed sense innocent of these crimes.  
  
All this really meant was they would not receive a public hearing, their names would not be announced and their mothers would not be shamed for having birthed mass-murderers.

The deaths of thousands could not go unanswered for and Misa and Light's names and pictures were given to the top security agencies in the world. Japan was asked by other governments to confine these bad actors regardless of who’d been pulling the strings. L thought cynically it was so people in those governments who had to put their faces on TV for the sake of their jobs, who might like to occasionally commit crimes, could sleep at night again.  
  
Kira had not been in the right. Such people were wolves, sure, but they had and would always need to exist. The wolves hunted, killed off the weakest and ran together while the rest slept. These were people like himself.  
  
Eventually L accepted the briefing from the NPA on what would become of the two convicts, the expected result of his work:

Maximum security confinement; multiple life sentences. 

“Better than death.” He had told Rem but she had not been satisfied.  
  
To soothe the shinigami’s strangely romantic inclinations, he’d written one more demand back to the Japanese NPA as the man who'd brought them the heads they'd been hunting for. He requested the two at least have each other’s company by being house in a shared room. He said it was because it was a proven that long term solitary made people lose their minds. It was only because Rem said that Misa would be happiest that way.  
  
L was a bit of a romantic himself. At least concerning knowledge. Light Yagami could still create something of immense value within that confinement. He asked the man be given a computer without internet access. And library access to whatever books he wanted which could all be billed to his accounts.  
  
Knowing that they would not die and have a modicum of comfort in each other - this was not true justice; it was better than they deserved.  
  
They deserved to rot but L didn’t want to go down with them.  
  
He’d have asked for more assurances all his conditions had been met but he'd already been onto his next enthralling case. A young female serial killer at work; the drained state of the dead truckers were like nothing he’d encountered prior.  
  
L didn’t have time to have any more time to have sympathy for the Kira convicts or the lonely immortal white devil who was in love with Misa Amane. The shinigami eventually took her notebook and left.  
  
Light's intoxicating combination of near superhumanly perfect traits had too dangerous an effect on him for closer contact to be advisable. He’d check back in a number of years.

* * *

 

Light had not seemingly aged a day since L had last seen him. That was the most unexpected part of their visit thus far. He looked like he'd been on an extended spa vacation. He was in clean black scrubs, clean shaven, white teeth shining, looking well-fed, looking gracefully at ease in a metal chair with one arm chained to the table.   
  
Sunshine filtered in through the ceiling. It was also somewhat surprising the high security facility looked like one of the brutalist architects had designed it.   
  
They shared no greeting while looking each other over. Eventually they met eachother's eyes, mutually narrowed. He felt again that primal feeling of combat-readiness Light always gave to him whenever he let his glare go so naked. He wondered what they looked like on the camera feed, as both of them bared their teeth in distaste with the other, he felt like a mangy black wolf facing down a shiny red fox.  
  
“Why are you even here? You got what you wanted. You even convinced both of us we were culpable. I have no memory of being Kira and neither had Misa. All we had strange blank parts of our memories. Shared gaps. So we both knew why we were here. Misa died to atone for sins she could not remember. And I'm dying a little more slowly. Go away another 3 years and I'm sure I'll be gone as well.”  
  
L chooses to ignore that, "You already know why I am here then."  
  
"Actually, the world doesn't revolve around you, so no, I don't."  
  
"Educated guess Light Yagami. Are you still making those."  
  
"Something in the records. Something I did. Is this about that guard I bit the neck of? He was in the hospital a week, didn't die, not even close. He deserved it. He was getting handsy with Misa."  
  
L had read that, and it had thrilled him a little to imagine, but he moves on, "The records I received also state that your internet privileges were revoked. Care to tell me why that is?” It had been extremely stupid of them to give Light access to the internet in the first place. Just a number of warnings they'd ignored from his end.  
  
“Pretending you care about something that mundane before you get to your big questions again? Your interrogation style never changed. It should say in the records. I can’t imagine you weren’t sent briefings. I hacked the post office bank to send my family 10 million yen after discovering my father suffered a heart attack and is too disabled to work anymore. It was to be distributed to my mother’s personal account over the next 20 years. I mean, it’s okay. Sayu got into Tokyo University on the government scholarship. She wrote me to say she’s going to take care of everyone.” Light flashed a smile.  
  
L remembered profiling Light’s fun-loving sister. She didn’t have the work ethic to get accepted somewhere like that. Let alone on full ride.  
  
So the money would have been what they caught by the time Light was getting overconfident with his systems hacking and social engineering. 

“Okay. I believed I mentioned Misa is dead. Let me think... Something like you.... something like you... I know. Are you here to tell me somehow I did that too.”  
  
“I hardly believe you would have killed her Light. When I received the notice I did read- she died as Misa Yagami. Was she pretty in white?”  
  
Light spits at him. “It’s not as if we were wed. I gave her what was left in my power to give her to make this all a little less like hell.”  
  
“How did it happen?” L asked, and in case Light mistakes his meaning for being about Misa and his paper marriage, “How did she die?”

“They did it.” He ground out.  
  
“Who did it. How?”  
  
“The imperial guard’s doctor botched her sterilization.” Light responded staring blankly ahead, looking emptied by what he was about to say. “She was in so much pain for a long time. She tried to hold on. She didn’t want me to be alone.”  
  
“She was sterilized,” L considered the phrasing, “You both were?”  
  
“My surgery went well.” Light assured him, darkly.

He’d forgotten how serious the Japanese were about keeping undesirables out of the gene pool. L has a sudden uncharacteristic guilt pang him, he smacks his lips and rubs them nervously. Ash in his mouth, coals in his eyes. Vasectomies were not easy to reverse and if they’d gone more medieval than that; he almost shuddered to think. 

Light’s voice sounded no higher though.  
  
So in all likelihood he'd lived through a small but life-changing surgery rather than a horror show.   
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“You’re not. Not for me anyway. It’s not how you wanted us being punished so you are pained about the method. That’s not a real apology.”  
  
“Light. Do you have any idea how many broken lives Kira left in his wake?”  
  
“I do. 756 children. Of those children, 22 orphans. 622 widows. 3 widowers.”  
  
“Yes. It was terrible. What you two did.”  
  
“Give me a break. Don’t act as if sorrow is in your emotional repertoire.”  
  
“They told you about these survivors. There were also those who were not recorded as Kira victims because you did not stick to killing criminals. Only I know about most of the non-criminal victims.”  
  
“Well, don’t get your panties in a bunch, they don’t tell me any goddamn thing. The guards do what they are told. They are the best in the country and they believe this job is beneath them. Back then, I had internet access and the information for the victims was readily searchable online. I told the imperial police officers I was trying to understand what I had done when I was under the demon’s control. It was always what I would pull up while utilizing hidden virtual boxes. Obviously none of them were watching all that carefully.”  
  
“You aren’t sorry either then.” Why is Light revealing these things out loud on camera? Any chance he might have access to internet information in the future would grow non-existent at the review of these logs.  
  
“I’m sorry about many things Ryuzaki. I’m sorry I ever met you, for one. That I once trusted that because we were friends everything would be okay. I understand you now. You didn’t ever care about justice. Winning is your MO. Misa and I were another example for you to tout about how you were never wrong.”  
  
“You two were spared the death penalty because of me. It was more than fair.”   
  
“It’s only about fairness? Were you able to raise your rates after bagging Kira?”  
  
“Quite a bit, actually, yes.” He can’t help but give a little smile at that. 

Stop a chaotic would-be god; get a pay raise.  
  
“You’re a psychopath.” 

“Are you an armchair psychologist now? I have a PhD in Criminal Psychology. You’re a sociopath, Kira.”

“You smile at me minutes after I tell you how badly I've suffered here and I'm the mentally sick one? Moreover, I was fool enough to wait for you to come here and argue my girlfriend and I out of inhumane confinement. Then I realized, as months turned into years - this is what you had wanted all along. I eventually concluded after three years of zero contact you wanted the death penalty for us but some more reasonable party convinced you otherwise.”  
  
“Were I a psychopath taking moral advice would go against my motivations. You might want to rethink this premise.”  
  
“Good. Do what you always do. Dodge the real issues. I feel like the PhD is another lie but if you are - I’m a little smarter than your average college kid armed with the DSM-4. You are a psychopath. I’m no sociopath. I have above-average narcissistic traits at most. Like every goddamn kid from my generation.”  
  
This is a pointless fight and L feels too restless to argue with Kira who is and isn't the insane person in the room. There are a number of orchids in the interview room with them. They seem strangely out of place in the concrete surroundings. "How long have you been effectively in solitary?”  
  
“Long enough to let almost every guard in rotation fuck me. You met Hiroshi. Big gruff man, ex sumo wrestler. Nice baritone. Married so he’s been holding out on me. Do put in a good word for me. A reference for my shower fellatio would suffice.”  
  
“Stop it.” L demanded. This was not a joke any prior version of Light Yagami would have made. An uneasiness started seeping through him.  
  
“I have counted 122 sunrises since Misa died. It is possible missed some of them.”  
  
“The dossier put your missus' date of death as no more than two months ago.” He'd gotten the dossier actually and the only thing he'd really cared get answered from this visit was why he was still alive if Misa was dead. Though Light making his mind have to work at this level of back-and-forth was making him nostalgic for the time they'd shared.  
  
“Are you not getting it? The imperial guard is a holier-than-thou branch of the NPA. They barely give a damn about you. In fact, they laugh at your self-congratulatory world's best detective title. They've asked me before if you have it on a mug or a t-shirt. They only answer to the emperor whom they consider to be a God. I’m surprised they even told you she died. That they even respect you that much.”  
  
Light was the problem of the Japanese government until he also died; and that’s all they saw him as. A natural born citizen who shamed their country to the rest of the world. An albatross around their necks. L had been wrong to think they'd appreciate his rare mind. They probably did everything they could not to encourage the man's intellectual input.  
  
He considered Light again, closer this time. This insanely beautiful creature who would tell him any number of things in all ways as long as the end result was what he wanted. Light was entirely at ease. It was as if L were the one chained to the table and he was the one who was free to move.

L realized he would hear anything from Light except the truth. That had always been the way with him. L couldn't help but feel this was natural coming from someone this apparently perfect; as if gritty, honest truth was too ugly to flow from such a pretty fount. 

  
Something was wrong here, Light should be completely out of sorts to be confronted with him now, so this conversation was over... he had to make it be over. L had heard all he was willing. He only knew two things. Light and Misa had not been properly imprisoned according to his recommendations. And Light was still an unreliable narrator so he had to disregard most of what had been said.

L exited as he had arrived by saying nothing.  
  
"You bast-" Light started to scream. But the door shut behind him was soundproofed.


End file.
